While President Donald Trump has made his immigration policies a top priority, the Department of Justice has dismissed 28 immigration judges from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), a move aligned with the president’s goal of shrinking the federal workforce. Scripps News confirmed that 28 judges were fired, including 13 who had just completed their training and were set to begin hearing cases. Judge Kerry Doyle was notified of the termination during her probationary period — one day before taking the bench. “The priority of this administration is to move forward on removals and to put people in removal proceedings, get removal orders and have that move forward. So it really doesn't make any real logical sense of why you would fire immigration judges, particularly ones, where, if the training had occurred as scheduled, we would start hearing cases this week or next week at the latest,” Doyle said.
By the end of the fiscal year 2024, there were only 735 immigration judges, three times the number in 2015. The backlog has still exploded, increasing more than 1,100% since 2012 and now exceeding 3.7 million pending cases, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC project. Many of those cases take years to be resolved due to the time it takes to get before a judge. "You see the piles of work, and then you're told it's not in the agency's interests to continue to employ you,” Doyle said. "I can't think of a rational explanation for why a decision like this would be taken.” Republican Senator James Lankford’s 2024 bipartisan immigration bill would have included $440 million to hire immigration judges and support staff at the Executive Office for Immigration Review. “Each judge handles 500 to 700 cases a year. You can quickly see the cases that will not be heard as the backlog increases. Hiring more immigration judges is essential to achieving the enforcement this president campaigned on,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union that represents immigration judges. The administration will likely see more border cases stack up, even as southern border crossings have hit historic lows. This is because the judges responsible for deportations also handle cases from the interior, including appeals related to Temporary Protected Status